A Slow meteor with flaring along the ablation path

A slow moving meteor around 9:15pm crossing the sky created a 'arrow'-shaped image above. CLICK ( to have a closer look) at the image to see the 'sudden increase in brightness' along the luminous flaring path.

Meteors - a dozen Dec 18/19 2008

Better sky condition.. Sirius and Canopus 'arced' in the exposure. The bunching revealed more meteors in early am. 6/12 detected in 04-05 am local time,

Geminids 2008 Dec 13/14 - Cloudy sky but.

I thought this year the Gems will be a washout judging from the strings of cloudy sky and rain. Dec 13 saw Venus and the feeble Jupiter in the cloudy sky early evening. So decided to put out my video ccd and let the recorder do all the work.

22:09 first Gem appeared follow by another at 22:30. The composite frames below illustrate the changing apparent radiant as earth rotates bring the constellations across the sky from east to west.

Gems 'cascade' down from the sky. Note a nice terminal flash from a meteor parallel to the TV antennae near the roof. Canopus traced a short arc on lower left - the # dots corresponds to the number of frames stacked in add_max2 command in IRIS.

Meteor 2008 Dec 13 Tally and Time in UT.

14-15 UT count: 1
15-16 UT count: 5
16-17 UT count: 2
17-18 UT count: 3
18-19 UT count: 2
19-20 UT count: 3
20-21 UT count: 3


1. Dec 13 14:09:58

2. 143059
3. 151405
4. 152827
5. 155239
6. 155950
7. 155954
8. 162717
9. 175657
10.184730
11. 185717
12. 190904
13. 195122
14. 195133
15. 200951
16. 202846
17. 203012

choper's path

nov 27 late nite meteor

Seeing a slight improvement in the sky condition, i put out the video lens. A slow meteor was caught before midnite. ( the tiny trail at the opposite end was created by a plane.)

a nice fireball in wide FOV

Nov 6 - Sprite and a bright meteor wide FOV

Sprites - Oct 30 2008

After 887 lightning flashes ( each one triggered a video recording) i screened through the images and apart from a handful of meteors - sprites stole the show instead. Six of the best one is stacked here. You will find one grouping cluster around the TV aerials and another group (one complete blue jet or 'carrot' and the other partially hidden). CLICK image above to view better.

Orionids 2008 - Oct 18/19 - FOV 68.6 x89.2

2008_10_18_23:18:19 till 10_19_05:45:48
composite from x17 images , stack using IRIS command add_max2 X 17 ( file in x1.fit...x17.fit)
brighter stars Sirius and Canopus created a trails in the composite.

Using UfoAnalyser Software - the ID of each meteor was identified - as expected, the backward propagation of quite a number of them intersected at radiant of of Orionids Meteor Shower - the dust trails from Halley's Comet. Majority of them detected in 4 - 5 am when the radiant is highest. Two Epsilon Geminids were detected too.

Lens : HG3808FCS-HSp 1/2" auto iris 3,8mm 1:0.8 / watec -902H

Impression of a fragmenting meteor

May 4 '08 Eta Aquarid Meteor

ETA meteor shower member - Halley's comet debris

ETA peaks around 2 am SGP on May 6 '08.
Above is a 6mm view composite of the meteors ( majority ETA + others) from 03:2820 till 06:1759.
The other camera was running
with 25mm lens. ( see image below).

A handful of ETAs were detected on May 04 am and several days earlier.
This is one of the brightest so far passing by the 'House' of The Teacup or Sagittarius. (25mm f0.90 lens/Wat902H2Ultimage) with x1 video frame extracted.
Here is the original 'peak-hold images' of the same meteor. You can see the progression of the meteor's head from starting to ending video frames

The radiant was around 15 degree - pretty low and quite a distance away from my camera
FOV ( see below skymap - Aquarius on lower left and Sag. top right corner).

test shot